From AFTER ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM
Clement Greenberg
The crux of the matter of the
aftermath of Abstract
Expressionism has, in any
case, little to do with influence in itself. Where artists divide in the
last resort is where safe taste leaves off. And this is as true in what begins
to look like the aftermath of Abstract Expressionism as it ever was. The
painters who follow Newman, Rothko,
or Still, individually or collectively, are as safe by now in their taste
as they would be following de
Kooning or
Gorky or Kline.
And I have the impression, anyhow, that some of those who have chosen to
do the first, and not the second, have done so because they
feel frustrated, merely frustrated, by the going versions of Abstract Expressionism
in New York.
This applies even more, I feel, to those other artists
in this country who have now gone in for "Neo-Dada" (I
except Johns), or con struction-collage, or ironic comments on the banalities
of the industrial
environment. Least of
all have they broken with safe taste. Whatever novel objects they represent
or insert in their works, not one of them has taken a chance with colour or
design that the Cubists or
Abstract Expressionists did not take before them (what happens when a real
chance is taken with colour can be seen from the
shocked distaste that the "pure" painting of Jules
Olitski elicits
among New York artists). Nor has any one of them, whether he harpoons stuffed
whales to plane surfaces, or fills water-closet bowls with diamonds, yet dared
to arrange these things outside the directional lines of the "all-over" Cubist
grid. The results have in every case a conventional and Cubist prettiness that
hardly entitles them to be discussed under the heading "After Abstract
Expressionism." Nor can those artists, either, be discussed under this
heading whose contribution consists in depicting plucked chickens instead of
dead pheasants, or coffee cans or pieces of pastry instead of flowers in vases.
Not that I do not find the clear and straightforward academic handling of their
pictures refreshing after the turgidities of Abstract Expressionism; yet the
effect is only momentary, since novelty, as distinct from originality, has
no staying power.
Excerpt, Art International, October 1962:24-32
